Expendability and Efficacy: The Slow Rise to the Rose-Colored Glass Ceiling – Institutional Support for Black Women Leaders

Introduction

A wise person reflected that progress is measured not by how far you’ve come but by how far you have yet to go. It is no secret that issues of gender and race remain a central topic of concern in America. Historically, there has been much discourse on the plight of those who experience and are negatively impacted by racial bias and those who are limited due to their gender. Parity in the form of opportunity, pay, and career advancement has not been granted automatically but fought for without remarkably meaningful gains on either front. Black women routinely face the combined effects of practices that discriminate based on gender and race within organizational cultures, attitudes, operations, and policies. It begins in primary school and does not end at the doors of the academy. Daily reminders keep women painfully cognizant of gender bias and racial discrimination through frequent microaggressions and tone policing from those they work with, teach and report to. These practices coalesce to produce extreme challenges in the form of burdensome tropes, stereotypes (e.g., an angry black woman), tokenism, colorism, sexism, imposter syndrome, glass ceilings; and intersectionality of those concerns with belonging, cultural diversity, identity, resilience and leadership callings (Chance, 2021; Johnson, 2017; Ross et al., 2015; Wright & Salinas, 2016). It is no wonder that the idea of black girls as less capable and more headstrong is embedded and carried along into adulthood and their professional lives.

The cumulative weight of navigating unchecked toxic forces in the workspace can have a deleterious impact on the self-perception of black women scholars as they seek professional self-actualization with limited role models for reference. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the well-established and conventionally accepted theory of motivation that is concerned with the capacity for the whole person to reach their true potentiality, is a relevant model (Rodriguez & Giuffrida, 2019). After the first two essential needs for physiological and safety assurances are met, the areas of belongingness and love, esteem, and finally, self-actualization can be realized. Lifelong feelings of inferiority, helplessness, and otherness can morph into an immutable and abiding syndrome of ‘imposter-ism.’ The entrenched design of the academy is one that cultivates uncertainty as it stifles creative drive and quality of life. Of course, passion fuels and inspires adept forward movement in and from the spirit of the radical black woman scholar despite the weight she carries as she seeks the rose-colored sky beyond the ceiling.

The literature is replete with examples of how bullying, discrimination, harassment, social conditions, and lack of appreciable advancement adversely influence black women’s experience and career progression in higher education (Davis & Maldonado, 2015; Ross et al., 2015). The prevalence of the adverse challenges of intersectionality, tokenism, and stereotype threat cannot be discounted as crucial factors in how black women experience their day-to-day. Most are exceedingly eager when they enter the academy’s ranks with well-intentioned plans for checking the boxes of required activity in their official roles while nimbly providing for and responding to those additional seemingly, obligatory tasks. Assuming those other non-official roles can feel unavoidable as part and parcel of the related duties. Overcoming adversity is routine and expected for black women, so they proceed with the best intentions of prevailing against all odds. Using adversity as motivational fuel to contribute substantively and enthusiastically to research, teaching, and service is a notion that may seem ideal for a time. Still, burnout may quickly ensue as all things are seldom equal. Several studies noted that women and faculty of color take on a disproportionate amount of the “invisible” work in the academy; advising and mentoring students, overseeing student organizations, serving on departmental and university committees, and other community-based service (Chance, 2021; Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group, University of Oregon, 2017).